Tag Archives: Joseph Lai

It’s been too long since we last visited the bizarre world of cut-rate Korean cartoons made by a Chinese guy using Japanese robots and characters and marketed toward Australian television, so let us once again steel ourselves for the bad acid trip that is a Joseph Lai produced cartoon. Lai, to bring up to speed those of you who don’t know him, was a producer most famous for taking bits and pieces of cheap Hong Kong and Taiwanese movies and splicing them together to form a new movie, usually augmented by freshly shot scenes of white people in ninja outfits. The films border on works of absurdist art masterpiece. With titles like Ninja Phantom Heroes, Ninja Demons Massacre, and Diamond Force Ninja, Lai’s films — often created in conjunction with shadowy men of mystery Godfrey Ho and Thomas Tang — did far more than make no sense at all. They attained a rarefied air of complete and utter incoherence that has remained largely out of the reach of even the most incompetent of filmmakers.

I once stayed at a place in the Smoky Mountains that was a combo motel and biker bar. The toilet in my dingy room was a hole cut in the floor of the bathroom, covered with screen door mesh and with a stucco bucket sitting on the ground beneath it. Solar Adventure is another Korean cartoon spawned by the same batch of animation commissioned by some Australian company and produced by Hong Kong cheapskate crap film mogul Joseph Lai. It certainly isn’t a motel room with a hole cut in the floor leading to a stucco bucket I was meant to use as a toilet, but it is perhaps somewhat similar to what you might expect to find as the contents of such a stucco bucket. But if Solar Adventure is largely a bucket full of piss, crap, used condoms, and cigarette butts, then it’s lucky that I have a very high tolerance for such things so long as they are not being rubbed into my hair. And while Space Thunder Kids may set the bar for incompetent glory so fabulously high that it becomes nigh unattainable, Solar Adventure is no slouch in the incompetence field.

You know, some people would sit down with pen in hand and engage in multiple viewings of a great and respected movie, taking meticulous notes pertaining to various aspects of said film that would promote intellectual dialog amongst high-minded luminaries in the field of film criticism and analysis. I, on the other hand, did much the same thing with Space Thunder Kids, and by “high-minded” I mean low-brow, and by “meticulous notes” I mean drunken ranting, and by “pen” I mean bourbon. Trust me, a bottle of bourbon is all that’s going to get you through the brain-frying glory of Space Thunder Kids, a film so utterly confounding, so dazzlingly inept in every single way imaginable, that it achieves an undeniable aura of the sublime that glows so brightly it threatens to blot out the rest of existence. And if you are worried that perhaps drinking an entire bottle of bourbon during a single movie could be detrimental to your health or to your comprehension of what you are watching, I say to you, “Have no fear, for Space Thunder Kids defies comprehension, and by the end of it you will be mopping up your own brain, which will have melted and oozed out the corner of your eyes as you vomit up your own intestines Lucio Fulci style.” The bourbon only makes it hurt less.